do so could not stem the tide of men marching in from the gate.  At the gate itself too the largest of the elephants had fallen sideways and lay there bellowing, blocking up the way for those who were trying to pass out, while one of the elephants of the reinforcing party, called “the Conqueror,” was looking for his master, who had fallen off his back mortally wounded.  Charging violently back against the surging tide of fugitives, the faithful beast trampled down friends and foes alike until he found his master’s body, when he seized it with his trunk and carried it upon his tusks; and then, turning round in a frenzy of grief, overturned and crushed every one whom he met.  As the men were thus crowded together, no one could do anything to help himself, but the whole mass surged backwards and forwards in one solid body.  The enemy who attacked them behind did them but little hurt; they suffered chiefly from one another, because when a man had once drawn his sword or couched his lance he could not put it up again, and it pierced whoever might happen to be forced against it.

XXXIV.  Pyrrhus, seeing the danger with which he was menaced on every side, took off the royal diadem from his helmet, and gave it to one of his companions.  He himself, trusting to the fact of his being on horseback, now charged into the mass of assailants, and was struck through his cuirass by one of them with a spear.  The wound was not a dangerous or important one, and Pyrrhus at once turned to attack the man from whom he had received it.  He was an Argive, not of noble birth, but the son of a poor old woman, who, like the rest, was looking on at the battle from the roof of her house.  As soon as she saw Pyrrhus attacking her son, in an ecstasy of fear and rage she took up a tile and hurled it at Pyrrhus.  It struck him on the helmet, bruising the spine at the back of his neck, and he fell from his horse, blinded by the stroke, at the side of the sacred enclosure of Likymnius.  Few recognized him, but one Zopyrus, who was in the service of Antigonus, and two or three others, seized him just as he was beginning to recover his senses, and dragged him into an archway near at hand.  When Zopyrus drew an Illyrian sword to cut off his head Pyrrhus looked so fiercely at him that he was terrified, and bungled in his work, but at length managed to sever his head from his body.  By this time most men had learned what had happened, and Halkyoneus, running up, asked to see the head, that he might identify it.  When he obtained this he rode off with it to his father, and finding him sitting amongst his friends, he threw it down at his feet.  Antigonus when he recognized it chased his son out of his presence, striking him with his staff, and calling him accursed and barbarous, and then covered his own face with his mantle and wept, remembering how in his own family his grandfather Antigonus and his father Demetrius had experienced similar reverses of fortune.  He had the body and head of Pyrrhus decently arranged